WW2 People

|   9 June 2010

The scary lady from SMERSH

Zinaida Pytkina – the scariest woman I ever met

I’ve just added the testimony of Zinaida Pytkina to the site – do listen to it if you can. Because she was one of the most extraordinary human beings I ever met – she was certainly the most terrifying woman, and bear in mind she was in her 70s when I encountered her in Volgograd about ten years ago.

This photo of her as a wartime SMERSH officer is remarkable, I think, because of her eyes. And she looked at me with exactly that same expression when I met her forty five years after the end of the war. She was one tough lady. Tough enough, for sure, to have no problems about executing a German officer at close quarters and in cold blood – as she told me she did in 1943. But, more than that, she confirmed that she would have been prepared to do pretty much anything to the Germans to get them to give up the fight against the Soviet Union. When she was asked to describe her mission during the war she replied: ‘My mission was to fulfil all the orders of my commanders’. And the implication was clear – whatever bloody deed her commanders asked of her – she’d have responded with alacrity.

And I was reminded of this hard, cyncial and uncompromising attitude on that same trip to Russia when I met a member of the FSB in Moscow. (The FSB, of course, is the successor to the KGB which was previously the wartime NKVD which had close links to SMERSH). This man – let’s call him Yuri – was a serving agent with the FSB. He was in his late twenties and immensely tough. Moreover he also had exactly the same look in his eyes as Ms Pytkina has in that photograph – maybe the Soviet secret police teach it in training.

I was meeting Yuri in an ‘unofficial’ capacity as we were inquiring about the possibility of gaining access to NKVD wartime archives. We met in a coffee shop near the Lubyanka, the infamous secret police headquarters in Moscow. In order to break the ice with Yuri (a big mistake since the ice turned out to be about three feet thick) I asked him to describe what he did all day. ‘What do I do all day?’ he said, glaring straight into my eyes: ‘what I do all day is to solve people’s problems for them.’

‘Useful chap to have around,’ I murmured before proceeding to business.

But then, six years after this encounter, in 2006, I saw that Alexander Litvinenko – the former FSB agent who was later murdered in London – revealed that he had worked in the ‘problem solving’ department of the FSB. And ‘problem solving’ meant committing murders.

Yuri and Zinaida Pytkina. Two peas from the same pod.

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WW2 Competitions

|   4 June 2010

Man in the photo

Yes, Frederick (see his comment below) is absolutely right. The man on the right of Hitler is Arno Breker, Hitler’s favourite sculptor, who accompanied Speer and the Fuehrer on their lightening, three hour early morning tour of Paris, 70 years ago this month.

Hitler wanted these ‘artists’ to accompany him so that they could see the glories of Paris, and thus be sure to construct bigger glories back in the German capital in response. And Hitler’s words to Speer that same evening (which Speer recorded in his autobiography ‘Inside the Third Reich’) give a chilling insight into the mentality of the German leader. ‘In the past I often considered whether we would not have to destroy Paris,’ said Hitler, ‘but when we are finished in Berlin, Paris will only be a shadow. So why should we destroy it?’

As Speer said, the idea that Hitler had considered destroying Paris merely because he didn’t want the French capital to overshadow Berlin reveals that he was most certainly a ‘ruthless and mankind-hating nihilist’.

A realisation that didn’t stop Speer serving him subsequently as armaments minister though, did it?

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WW2 Competitions

|   1 June 2010

Competition Result – May

Here is the result of the May WW2History.com members’ competition. The question was – who is the Nazi on the left of this picture, accompanying Adolf Hitler on his victorious tour of France 70 years ago this month?

I thought it was a tough question since the Nazi concerned doesn’t actually quite look his normal self in this photo. But it wasn’t a tough question at all for the subscribers to WW2History.com since the majority of people who entered the competition got the answer right. It’s Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect and later armaments minister.

The three lucky winners, selected at random, who each receive a signed copy of Ian Kershaw’s brilliant ‘Hitler: Nemesis,’ are: Mr Flaherty of Preston, Mr Jackson of Brighton and Mr Pichardie of France. Congratulations, gentlemen! Your prize should arrive in the next few days.

Incidentally, I wonder how many people know who is on the right of the picture? Now, surely, that will stump almost everyone. In fact, I’ll come clear here, I wasn’t absolutely certain who it was until I asked Sir Ian Kershaw himself to confirm the answer. There’s no prize for knowing the answer to this extra question (because there is a new and different competition already in the Members’ Zone for June) but I’ll give the answer later this week.

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WW2 Anniversary

|   25 May 2010

Churchill’s lucky break

In May 1940 Churchill’s government got lucky.

Seventy years ago today, something quite extraordinary happened. Or rather, to be more precise, something quite extraordinary didn’t happen.

German tanks, which were in position to advance on the British Expeditionary Force which had retreated to the channel port of Dunkirk, did not move forward to crush the soldiers on the beaches. They weren’t ordered to attack until three days later, on 28 May 1940. As a result, Churchill and the rest of the British leadership were able to organise the evacuation of over 300,000 allied troops. It was, said Churchill, a ‘miracle of deliverance’. But if it was a ‘miracle’ then the person who should be thanked is Adolf Hitler.

At a meeting on 24 May 1940 attended by both Hitler and General Gerd von Rundstedt, the commander of Army Group A, the decision had been taken to stop the German advance. But why? What were the reasons behind this seemingly idiotic decision? Over the years many different theories have been proposed. Was Hitler trying to send a secret message to the British by allowing them to save their troops – one which emphasised his desire to seek peace with them? Were there technical problems with the Panzers? Was Hitler simply not thinking straight, drunk on the euphoria of Germany’s swift victory in France?

Read the rest of this entry

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WW2 Relevance

|   18 May 2010

How do revolutions start?

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Bangkok – serene no more

The desperate events that are happening now in Bangkok fill me with profound gloom.

I have been in love with Thailand since I first visited the country twenty five years ago. My family and I go there on holiday whenever we can. In my experience the people are wonderful, the food and hotels are both inexpensive and high quality, the Buddhist culture wholly admirable and the atmosphere serene.  Which shows you just how wrong a tourist can be – since the place is clearly not the least bit serene today. The idea that soldiers are firing live ammunition at protesters near the Dusit Thani Hotel – where my family and I ate seafood in complete calm just a few months ago – just doesn’t compute.

Clearly the anger of Thailand’s poor and dispossessed cannot now be suppressed without social change or violent oppression. Like many countries, Thailand is a country of two halves – the relatively rich south (especially the capital, Bangkok) and the comparatively poor north (especially the north east). In the north east I have seen people living off roasted insects. That’s a long way from the tiger prawns of the Dusit Thani.

But events in Thailand have also made me think again about a question that has been in my mind almost as long as my love of Thailand. Which is, when you see the power of street protest, why was there so little open revolt in Nazi Germany? Of course, one obvious answer which many people immediately think of is terror – Nazi Germany was a ruthless dictatorship, Thailand is a democracy (well, of sorts, that’s part of the problem). But, actually, that explanation doesn’t really work. Just think of the mass street protests in 2007 in Burma (which is governed by a hideous dictatorship relying on terror) or the near open revolution in Communist China in 1989 at Tiananmen Square. History shows us that determined and courageous people can protest even in the most appalling of circumstances – and at the risk of losing their own lives. Read the rest of this entry

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WW2 Relevance

|   7 May 2010

The Poles, Katyn and the recent plane crash.

The Polish flag flies at half mast at the Polish Centre, West London

Someone once asked me a really unexpected question: of all the sites of death and destruction that I had ever visited, which did I think still felt the saddest today?

It wasn’t a question I’d ever considered before – despite having traveled to many places in the world which have an extremely depressing history. Most obviously Auschwitz, of course, but also some terrible battlefields like Vyazma, west of Moscow, where I remember seeing rusting military equipment still lying amidst the trees, or the fields around Stalingrad where each spring human bones still push their way up through the thawing earth.

So I had to think a bit before I gave my answer. And in the end I could only narrow it down to two locations – each of which seemed as desperate as the other. The first was the site of Treblinka death camp. What was so dreadful about this place was the immensity of the crime committed here – around 900,000 people were killed on this one spot – combined with the scale of the camp. Treblinka was tiny. Only a few hundred meters square. And the reason it was so small was because it only had one function – murder. Almost everyone who came here was dead within a few hours of arriving.

And the other site that had the most profound impact on me was a forest near Smolensk in Western Russia. A forest called Katyn. It was here in April 1940 that the Soviet secret police – the NKVD – shot around 4,000 Polish citizens, the vast majority of them officers in the Polish Army. (Over 20,000 members of the Polish elite were murdered that April in total, since there were two other related murder sites elsewhere in Russia). Read the rest of this entry

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WW2 Relevance

|   3 May 2010

Athens: a warning?


This is Athens as we want it to be.


This is the new reality

Over the years I’ve met a large number of people who lived through the extraordinary transformation in the fortunes of the Nazi party between 1928 and 1933. In the elections of 1928 the Nazis gained less than 3% of the vote – they seemed an irrelevance in German politics. Yet by January 1933 they were the biggest party in Germany and Hitler was Chancellor.

‘You just can’t imagine how quick things can change,’ many of these Germans said to me. ‘One moment it seemed that everything was stable, certain, and the next the banks had crashed, the middle-class had lost their savings, there was mass unemployment, and the whole fabric of our culture seemed to be unraveling. You couldn’t even walk through the parks – it just wasn’t safe anymore. There was so much crime. And Hitler offered us salvation from all of that disorder.’

I thought of those sentiments on a recent visit to Athens. Read the rest of this entry

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WW2 Controversies

|   3 May 2010

Why do so many people want to think Hitler was mad?

In Quentin Tarantino’s recent film ‘Inglourious Basterds’ Hitler was portrayed as an absolute weirdo. This Hitler screams at his Generals, bangs his fist on the table and suggests that Brad Pitt’s team of commandos might be ghostly apparitions. If not certifiably mad, the Hitler of ‘Inglourious Basterds’ certainly has more than several screws loose.

Tarantino’s version of an unhinged Hitler is typical of the way Hitler has been shown recently in popular culture. It’s an impression that was massively reinforced by Oliver Hirschbiegel’s 2004 epic, ‘Downfall’. Whilst this was an altogether more serious feature film attempt to show the ‘real’ Hitler – one which focused on the last days in the bunker – Bruno Ganz, who played Hitler, still shakes and screams for all he is worth. So much so that several scenes have become a kind of internet phenomenon, with different people submitting comical subtitles over Ganz’s ranting.

There’s only one problem with all this. Which is that Hitler, in the words of Professor Sir Ian Kershaw, the world expert on the German leader, simply ‘wasn’t clinically mad or clinically insane.’ Yes, Hitler’s personality was showing signs of disintegrating in the last days of his life – and in that respect Ganz’s Hitler may not have been so far from the truth – but by focusing only on the endgame we obscure the real history, which is a much more troubling one than the screaming and sweating Hitler of popular culture allows. Read the rest of this entry

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